from the Weibo-vs-WeChat dept

Techdirt has been reporting for a while on China's continuing clampdown on the internet, the latest step being the new national security law. You might think these stringent measures, combined with numerous previous moves to strengthen censorship, would be enough. But a fascinating report in The Australian Financial Review reveals that over the last few years the Chinese authorities have also used other techniques in order to ensure that their control of the online world is as complete as possible.

As we reported last year, the number of posts on the Chinese microblog site Weibo plummeted by 70% as a result of new censorship rules that were brought in. The Australian Financial Review feature explains what happened next:

[China's Communist Party], which runs one of the world's slickest propaganda machines, was smart enough not to kill off social media entirely. Instead, it has encouraged the development of a more appropriate platform.

That is WeChat, the four-and-a-half-year-old service that boasts 500 million active users and a parent company with a sharemarket value of $US190 billion ($248 billion), making it the world's eighth-largest technology stock.

Here's the crucial difference between Weibo and WeChat:

Acquiring friends or followers on WeChat is more difficult than Weibo, as you either need to know a user's phone number, be in their vicinity or meet them in person whereby you can scan their QR code. Then they must accept your invitation to become a contact.

There is also no search function to seek out celebrities or opinion leaders and no way to determine how many followers or friends a user has.

That makes WeChat much more intimate -- and much less useful for spreading hot news rapidly or stirring things up.

Not content with replacing the mass-medium Weibo with the smaller-scale WeChat, the Chinese authorities have also ensured that the celebrities of the social media world, who once wielded immense online power, and represented an emerging challenge to the state, have been reined in. Sometimes this was done in the crudest possible manner, as the arrest of a popular political blogger last year shows:

At a nearby police station, in addition to the handcuffs, shackles were placed on his ankles. They would remain in place for 24 hours while he was interrogated.

Blackmail was the blogger's stated crime, although no documents were produced to substantiate these allegations.

"They told me just confess to something and you can go home. If I didn't co-operate, they said, 'you will be in jail for years'."

Remarkably, he didn't, and the situation deteriorated:

In the months after his detention, the man's father has been threatened and the blogger has been beaten up twice by hired thugs, once outside a public building watched over by security guards.

Understandably, in the end he yielded:

After some initial resistance, the blogger who describes himself as a "mild reformist" retreated from the field of battle. He is no longer exposing corruption and hypocrisy within the party.

After a few other high-profile bloggers were arrested and treated harshly, the intimidation could become more subtle:

Last month, at a state-run hotel outside Beijing, a group of China's most influential bloggers assembled. None was there by choice.

They had been summonsed to the Changping district, north-west of the capital, by the State Internet Information Department for a seminar on "Domestic Current Affairs".

It was the modern version of a re-education camp, complete with swimming pool, towelling robes and a buffet breakfast.

Central to that re-education were some helpful hints about what topics they might like to write about in the future:

During the seminar, the authorities even put up a slide, showing what they believed to be a successful re-education of one blogger. The person in question, who had once written about politics and the rule of law, had now turned his keyboard to more appropriate subjects, according to the moderator, such as hotel reviews, fashion and first-world type lifestyle problems.

As the rest of The Australian Financial Review's report makes plain, most of the country's top bloggers have gotten the message. Social media is now a "dreary mix of food reviews and gossip," and China's grip on the online world looks firmer than ever.

from the legal-system-run-amuck dept

For years we've been paying somewhat loose attention to the saga involving Brett Kimberlin and his ongoing lawsuits against bloggers. The story was complex and convoluted from the beginning, and only got more so over time. In fact, it got so confusing that it almost became too difficult to jump into the story mid-stream. On top of that, the "partisan" overtones of many of the folks debating the story (on both sides) made it even more of a farce. When Kimberlin lost one of his lawsuits against some bloggers a few weeks ago, we debated writing a story, but there was so much back story to cover (and so many other things going on) that we let it slide. Thankfully, Dave Weigel, writing for the Daily Beast has a giant story about last month's trial, including much of the background. If you're unfamiliar with the Kimberlin saga (or even if you're very familiar with it), it's a worthwhile read.

The short version is that Kimberlin is a guy who had some significant legal problems back in the 70s, including being convicted of the so-called Speedway bombings. In the 1980s, he got lots of attention for claiming to have sold marijuana to Dan Quayle. In the 1990s, a book was written about him by Mark Singer called Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin, but that "deeply weird American journey" was far from over. In the 2000s, he got attention warning about e-voting machines and the possibility of fraud (something we wrote about extensively at the time as well). But in the 2010s, it appears his "deeply weird" journey has moved onto suing people who say things he doesn't like.

Weigel's writeup of the trial is well worth reading, highlighting just how ridiculous the charges were, and how it was pretty clear that Kimberlin was suing these bloggers simply because he didn't like what they said about him, rather than on the basis of anything that was actually defamatory. The end result was that Kimberlin lost spectacularly. It didn't even go through a full trial. Kimberlin presented his evidence, and the judge ruled against him on the spot (i.e., without the other side having to go through its whole argument). As Ken "Popehat" White explains:

After the close of Kimberlin's day of "evidence," the judge granted a motion for a directed verdict against him. Under Maryland law, that means the judge necessary found "a total failure of legally sufficient evidence to prove" Kimberlin's remaining defamation claim. The judge didn't just find Kimberlin's evidence unpersuasive; he effectively found it irrelevant

Reading Weigel's account of the trial, you can quickly see why the judge ruled that way. So many of the points raised by Kimberlin clearly had nothing to do with anything coming anywhere near defamation, but rather were focused on "people said mean things online." For example, Kimberlin questioned one of the defendants, Robert Stacy McCain, about a blog post supposedly making fun of Kimberlin's daughter's singing career (in reality, that's only mentioned in passing -- most of the post is about Brett Kimberlin himself). Kimberlin then calls his own daughter, Kelsie, to the stand to testify (I'm not making this up) about how Taylor Swift tweeted some of her videos, leading Kimberlin to ask her, "So, are you considered a child prodigy?"

After the ruling, Kimberlin made it clear to Weigel that he wasn't done, and he intended to keep bringing new legal actions to tie everyone up in court (Kimberlin, in the past has allegedly made similar threats, saying, "I have filed over a hundred lawsuits and another one will be no sweat for me. On the other hand, it will cost you a lot of time and money and for what," in an email to another blogger (who posted the email). Here's what Kimberlin told Weigel:

“These guys are going to come out today and say I’m a pedophile,” said Kimberlin. “And tomorrow, I can file another lawsuit against them. And now I know what I need to do. It’s going to be endless lawsuits for the rest of their lives. And that’s what it ends up being. I sue them. They sue me. They come into court. I sue them. They come into court. That’s the way it is.”

For years we've written about various attempts by people to get others to shut up when they say or write unkind things. Our legal system isn't supposed to allow that sort of thing. Kimberlin's actions are, once again, a (strong) reminder why we really need a federal anti-SLAPP law that will help get bogus lawsuits designed to stifle constitutionally-protected speech tossed out quickly.

A food blogger in France has been fined 1500 euros ($2,040 USD) for writing a negative review of a restaurant. According to Arret Sur Images (translated), Caroline Doudet wrote an unflattering review of Il Giardino, an Italian restaurant in Cap-Ferret, France in August of 2013 on her blog Les Chroniques Culturelles. She was brought to court six months later by the restaurant.

Doudet's review is actually a blog post, one that would require readers to do a little digging to get past the normal review sites. As far as I can tell from the translation, Doudet portrayed the lousy service she encountered in a far more humorous fashion than most negative reviews, all the while clearly pointing out the deficiencies she encountered.

So, rather than address the issues, or simply disregard the single voice complaining about the three waitpersons apparently needed to acquire a single round of beverages (not to mention quality issues with the food [and service] past that point), Il Giardino decided to make its mégot mal a full-blown legal affair.

Sud Ouest reports (translated) that the lawyer for the restaurant claims that the post caused "great harm" to his client because when the restaurant was Googled, the negative review was one of the first results.

Ah, yes. SEO uber alles (he said, fearlessly mixing European dialects like a trainspotting linguist). Great harm was apparently suffered and, therefore, the person who received lousy service from the aggrieved entity must pay. The court apparently agreed with this faulty line of logic (possibly due to Google's name being raised [and presumably greeted with involuntary hisses by attending countrymen]) and slapped the blogger with a hefty fine and a request that she "change the title" of the offending post.

Doudet was also charged $1,360 in court costs, bringing her total fines to a positively KlearGearian level of vindictive ridiculousness ($3,400).

There are too many things wrong with this court decision to enumerate, but Doudet's take on the fiasco sums it up beautifully.

"If bloggers do not have the freedom to write negative reviews, positive reviews make no sense either."

If businesses like Il Giardino want to continue living a "hear no evil" existence, that's fine. But no one should believe anything positive posted about the restaurant anywhere -- not if this is how the business reacts when it's criticized. Every so often, something truly defamatory should be addressed in this fashion, but just being criticized shouldn't trigger this sort of reaction. If the restaurant's Google juice is so diluted it can't outweigh a blogger, the problem lies with the restaurant, not the critic. Now that it's punished a critic, its reputation has gone completely south, something that wouldn't have happened if it had just accepted the fact that bad reviews happen and moved on.

from the a-personal-threat dept

I've always kind of known that Vladimir Putin was a bit of a bastard. Between his hypocrisy on government snooping, to his horrific record on matters of artistic and political speech, and his absolute willingness to destabilize his neighborhood in favor of having Russia pick up some territory that didn't belong to it in the form of Georgia and Ukraine. That said, two recent actions by Putin are starting to make me think this guy might just be as bad as everyone says.

Any new film containing obscene language won't be granted a distribution certificate, so there's no chance of seeing it at the movie theater. And copies of books, CDs or films containing swearing can only be distributed in a sealed package labeled "Contains obscene language," a Kremlin statement said. According to state news agency ITAR-Tass, individuals caught using foul language face a fine of up to $70, while officials can be fined up to $40 and businesses nearly $1,400. They face a higher fine and a three-month suspension of business for repeated offenses.

As of the time of this writing, it's unclear exactly what will constitute "obscene" language, though the Russian government has helpfully noted that they'll be the ones judging such obscenities with an "independent examination," which is likely to be just as "independent" as you'd suppose. Given the fact that Russia has found the LGBT community in the past to be oh-so icky-icky, you'd have to imagine that language dealing with their community will be on the list, alongside some of the hallmark swear words, like religiously offensive language, f-bombs, and-

"Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!"

Er, thank you, Mr. President. My problem with this should be obvious: I love swearing. Seriously, I use the f-word as a verbal comma. But putting me aside, the idea that a developed nation's leader could think so little of his own people as to make it the state's responsibility to protect their delicate little ears is beyond silly. Restrictions on free speech are one thing, but when you're restricting the only speech that makes logical sense as a reaction to the very restriction on that speech, things have gone recursively wrong. Because if your first reaction to someone telling you that you can't swear any longer isn't "Well, shit," then you have a problem.

Russia has taken another major step toward restricting its once freewheeling Internet, as President Vladimir V. Putin quietly signed a new law requiring popular online voices to register with the government, a measure that lawyers, Internet pioneers and political activists said Tuesday would give the government a much wider ability to track who said what online.

Widely known as the “bloggers law,” the new Russian measure specifies that any site with more than 3,000 visitors daily will be considered a media outlet akin to a newspaper and be responsible for the accuracy of the information published. Besides registering, bloggers can no longer remain anonymous online, and organizations that provide platforms for their work such as search engines, social networks and other forums must maintain computer records on Russian soil of everything posted over the previous six months.

This is, of course, aimed at chilling speech critical of Putin's Russian government, which currently seems to be attempting to scale back the whole democracy thing and inch closer and closer to the days of the Soviet Union. I don't say that lightly. Russia's restrictions on speech, freedom, persecution of minorities, and a clear aim towards expansion of real territory and cultural influence are something right out of the post World War Two era. This might scare some people, but not me.

Why? Because, just like the recent revolution in Ukraine, this kind of thing doesn't work any longer. And, yes, I realize that there are nations out there that still restrict the internet, speech, and freedoms, but they don't go from democratically free back to repression any longer. That whole thing about the internet being the "Wild West" is true in some ways. Putin will never be able to plug all the holes. He'll never be able to tamp down all the critical speech. And, like the former Ukraine government found before him, he will end up finding that the tighter he grips the internet's throat, the stronger it will fight back. It may not be quick, but it will happen.

An American market blogger found himself on the receiving end of a 8,000 euro fine for quoting another blogger. In real money, that works out to an almost $11,000 fine. And all for quoting another blogger's best guess on a French bank's leverage ratio.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a US blogger who covers global markets and his story begins this way.

Société Générale took exception to the numbers and came up with its own set of numbers. According to SG, its leverage was 9.3%.

Chevallier revamped his math after SG's initial noisemaking and Shedlock issued an addendum to his own post.

Société Générale disputes the numbers and new calculations using the banks' numbers are 28:1 or perhaps 23:1 not 50:1 as noted on Forex Crunch.

My position has not changed much. Something is seriously wrong at Société Générale. Banks do not plunge out of the blue on rumors. I do not know the precise leverage, but shares are acting as if Société Générale has severe capital constraints (which of course they will deny) and/or other major problems.

That only seemed to irritate SG more. It contacted the SEC and basically informed the American regulatory body that whatever numbers it's presented were to be taken as fact. The SEC passed this complaint on to Shedlock, adding (paraphrased by Shedlock) "French banks [are] notorious about filing frivolous complaints."

Shedlock received a few more letters (in French) which urged him to respond to the complaints (but only in French), which he duly ignored. Later, a French blogger compiling his own post on the issue (entitled: Gross Delirium: The AMF sanctions bloggers rather than financial corporations!) contacted Shedlock and offered his assistance. One of Shedlock's friends broke down the French bank's complaints into plain English.

The French authorities accuse Chevallier of 'knowingly disseminating false information' about SocGen and you to have disseminated it further on 'Chevallier's urging', although you should have known better and it was your duty to check if his numbers were right (that is the basis for fining him 10,000 and you 8,000 euros).

None of this mattered to the French bank, which accused the bloggers' calculations of possibly "influencing" its share price. While the SEC may have passed on the complaint with an eyeroll, the AMF, which regulates the French stock market, took the accusations at face value and issued fines to both bloggers. Not that the AMF is going to have much luck collecting these fines. Chevallier is appealing the verdict and suing AFP (France's largest newspaper) for making "false and defamatory accusations." Shedlock, conversely, is doing nothing.

The Witch hunt is now over and I was fined nearly as much as Chevallier. It's absurd enough to fine someone for a quote, and even more so when the facts are accurate.

The AFM has no jurisdiction over me, so they won't collect. As a US citizen living in the US, I am not subject to the absurdities of French laws, or French witch hunts. All they get from me is a vow to never go to France.

Good idea, considering French law apparently provides regulatory bodies with the power to fine bloggers for publishing their opinions on French banks, even when these opinions are backed up by reasonable calculations. And Shedlock is almost certainly protected under the SPEECH Act, which protects Americans against foreign judgments that would violate the First Amendment here. There doesn't seem to be much "regulation" going on in this situation. (And any French legislation that touches on the internet is routinely terrible.) Conceivably, SG could leverage itself Lehman-style and financially beat into submission anyone who points out this fact by running and complaining to the nearest subservient "authority."

from the it's-a-step,-but-a-small-one dept

We've written a few times about the infamous Thomas M. Cooley Law School, more famous for its terrible reputation and its own "ranking" system to try to hide that terrible reputation than for producing any decent lawyers. A few years ago, we wrote about the law school suing a former student, who was criticizing the school via an anonymous blog. Bizarrely, a district court allowed the school to unmask the blogger. Thankfully, however, an appeals court has now reversed the lower court ruling and said that the blogger has a right to anonymity.

A unanimous Court of Appeals decided that the trial judge, Clinton Canady, was wrong to deny a protective order barring Thomas M. Cooley Law School from disclosing the name of a former student whom it had sued, alleging that harsh criticisms of Cooley on his blog, the Thomas Cooley Law School Scam, were defamatory. The majority opinion faults the trial judge for deciding that Michigan law does not require such a protective order, and for assuming that a public figure like Cooley is exempt from having to allege and prove actual malice simply because the Doe had called its conduct criminal. Under the ruling, Doe will be able to seek to have the complaint dismissed either on its face or for lack of evidence to support the claim that his blog is defamatory.

That said, as Paul Levy notes, in the above blog post, this is not a complete victory, as the court failed to provide important guidance to future cases in Michigan concerning these kinds of issues, and specifically fell down on the important point of requiring notice in such cases. Many other courts have said that if you are seeking to unmask an anonymous commenter, there must also be notice to that anonymous person such that they can seek to block being revealed. The appeals court in Michigan decided not to establish that as a rule.

For future cases, however, it is disappointing that the majority opinion, in its effort to avoid applying the Dendrite and Cahill standards directly, gave little guidance to trial courts about the standards under which anonymous speakers' requests for protective orders should be decided by trial judges. And most troublesome is the majority's deliberate refusal to address the notice requirement on which every other state appellate court has insisted, because otherwise an anonymous defendant may not know that a subpoena has been issued seeking his identifying information. Thus, while the Doe was well-protected in this case, that is only because Cooley Law School issued a press release announcing its defamation claims, enabling the Doe to file a motion to block the subpoena.

A powerful opinion by Judge Jane Beckering concurs in the decision to overturn the denial of anonymity protection and remand the case, but strongly disagrees with the reasoning, arguing that Michigan should embrace the approach taken by almost very other state that has addressed the issue and adopt clear standards to guide trial judges. Judge Beckering explains that Michigan's existing rules require notice before subpoenas can be issued, and hence that appropriate First Amendment standards can be incorporated without any need to change the current rules.

from the that's-not-cool dept

As a bunch of you have been submitting, TorrentFreak recently had the bizarre story of a Danish law school student and legal blogger who had been writing a lot about file sharing... and then was raided by police who were told he ran a private BitTorrent tracker by the local anti-piracy organization, RettighedsAlliancen. While the guy admits he downloaded some unauthorized content, and is a member of the site in question, he had nothing to do with running it, and worries that this is really more about harassment for his blogging. Rather than denying it, the anti-piracy group seems to delight in the fact the guy has a blog where he explains to people how to be anonymous online, saying "we can see that he teaches others to break the law and conceal themselves on the net." I had no idea it was against the law to conceal yourself online...

from the not-getting-it dept

Incredible. Jonathan Tasini, the guy who filed that ridiculous lawsuit against the Huffington Post for not paying the bloggers who volunteered to write for free, apparently has a blog where he seeks out contributions from writers... and then, no, he doesn't pay them. John Cook at Gawker called him up to ask about this, leading to the following, absolutely hilarious, exchange:

"It hasn't had any ads in several years, but there were a couple unions that did buy some advertising," he said. "They wanted to support the work I was doing." So how much of that did he kick back to commenters and readers whose e-mails he ran? "There was never a thought that we would do that," he said. "Oh, I see what you're doing. Are you comparing my little blog to the Huffington Post? That's absurd."

Except, it's not absurd. As far as I can tell, his argument is that the Huffington Post is different because it's "successful," whereas his blog is a failure, so it's okay. Interesting legal theory, though I can't see how it holds up in court.

from the does-this-mean-I-have-a-record...-or-a-problem? dept

If you've ever read the Guinness Book of World Records, at some point, you've got to wonder how they go about verifying some of this stuff. I mean, how do they figure out who has the longest fingernails? I do remember the rather lengthy section of the (absolutely fantastic) book Road Fever, in which the author of the book, Tim Cahill, describes the process he and his driving partner had to go through to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for the fastest drive from the southernmost tip of South America to the top of North America. He makes it clear that the Guinness people take these things seriously, though I'd never put much thought into the specifics until recently.

You see, the other day, I saw Karl Bode mention on Twitter that the folks at the Guinness Book of World Records apparently awarded the record for the "most prolific professional blogger," to a guy named Darren Murph who writes for Engadget. The award was apparently given out sometime last fall, though Bode just noticed it. The "record" was for 17,212 blog posts. Bode checked on his own work for BroadbandReports, and realized he had a few hundred more blog posts. I was pretty sure I'd done a bit more than that, so I checked. Turns out that I've written nearly 38,000 blog posts (it'll be there within a week or two). In other words, it appears I've written more than twice the number of blog posts as the supposed world record holder.

My first thought: Neat -- I beat the world record! My second thought: Perhaps I blog too much. And, finally, my third thought: just how do the Guinness folks go about fact checking these sorts of awards, anyway? On the whole, though, I'm somewhat amused. Of course, if they missed me, I've got to assume they missed a bunch of others as well, including (almost certainly) others who are more prolific than I am. So, can we do some crowdsourcing and see if we can help out the good folks at Guinness and figure out who else might be among the most prolific professional bloggers out there? Because, for something I had never even thought about a few days ago... suddenly, I'm curious.